Mass commodity culture and identity: the Morning Chronicle and Irish migrants in a nineteenth-century Welsh industrial town

Abstract

This is an original contribution to the debate on representations of Irish migrants in nineteenth-century British towns. It analyses a new form of investigative journalism to locate Irish migrants as outsiders by detailing their exclusion from an emerging mass commodity culture in an industrial town. It also argues that the series mapped industrial Britain in a new way. This is an original approach to investigative journalism in the nineteenth century, showing how commodities could be used as a form of exclusion. It is a reference point for studies of representations of minorities.The ?Labour and the Poor? investigations of the Morning Chronicle newspaper, which charted social conditions in towns outside London in 1849?51, subjected Irish migrants in Britain to a hostile journalistic gaze. In the case of the iron-manufacturing town of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales, the minority Irish ethnic identity was defined by observers in terms of exclusion from an emerging mass commodity culture and in opposition to the native working class. This early investigative journalism deployed some conventions of the contemporary novel that were familiar to its mainly middle-class readership to root social identities in material conditions.Peer reviewe

Review of periodical literature published in 2008

“…The overarching theme was identity. The emphasis on material possessions (or the lack of them in the case of Irish immigrants) in press reports on working‐class homes is taken by O'Leary (in Urban History ) as evidence of how, in the new mass commodity culture, social identities were increasingly rooted in material conditions. Cheang examines how the ownership, manipulation, and display of Chinese embroideries in British homes helped to construct British identities.…”